Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Plantinga on Religion and Science in the New York Times
Today's New York Times has an interesting story about the extremely influential philosopher of religion (and a former teacher of mine) Alvin Plantinga and his new book on religion and science. Setting aside reservations about this or that aspect of Reformed epistemology and Plantinga's work in philosophy of religion, the article captures Plantinga's importance to the project of Christian scholarship, the compatibility of religious belief and science, and the role of properly basic beliefs in defense of the rationality of theism. It's pertinent here because, even in a remote field such as law, it seems to me that one of the persistent challenges facing Catholic higher education is allaying the worry that there is somehow a tension between science and religion. But if you have a Thomist doctrine of creation and divine causality and a tradition-constituted interpretation of the Bible, biological evolution need not and should not pose any difficulty at all. Indeed, at Villanova we can take special delight that the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, was an Augustinian friar.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/12/plantinga-in-the-new-york-times.html
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Over on First Things, someone named who identifies himself as Fr. Kev Kevin, SJ, says the following:
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Plantinga is so brilliant that what I’m about to say is probably impious. But here goes.
Plantinga is of very little use to Catholics or those interested in the classical tradition of Christian philosophy.
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Someone named Brandon says:
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Fr. Kevin is quite right; Plantinga is largely useless for Catholics — e.g., Catholics are not Calvinists and thus are going to have difficulty working around Plantinga’s broadly Reformed assumptions about the very nature of Christian philosophy, theology, and the relation between reason and faith. (And they are late Reformed assumptions, at that; Turretin would have only marginally easier time taking him seriously on such points than Bellarmine.) And contrary to Stephen P., he’s useless for critiquing the presuppositions of the Scholastic tradition, Catholic or Reformed, because he just doesn’t do the serious exegetical work that would require.
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Unfortunately, they said this AFTER I bought the book. Actually, I am not opposed to reading something that is not from a Catholic point of view, but I would be interested if anyone here has any comments on the above.